Digital Confidential: A Change is Gonna Come

Damian Collins MP | 1st March 2021 | Uncategorised

The storming of the Capitol on January 6. Tyler Merbler

In the social media age, the amplification of a constant drumbeat of false and harmful messaging that can radicalise its recipients, argues Damian Collins

In Digital Confidential, Damian Collins delves into the growing tension between tech giants' seemingly limitless power and the urgent needs of democracy. A 1964 Ku Klux Klan meeting led by Clarence Brandenburg in Hamilton County, Ohio and recorded by a Cincinnati television station has become central to two big debates this year. Firstly, should President Donald Trump have been impeached for his part in an insurrection at the US Capitol on the 6 January, which sought to prevent the Congress confirming the election of Joe Biden as America’s next President. Then, whether Facebook and Twitter right to de-platform him by closing down his social media accounts. Following that meeting of the Klan, Brandenburg was convicted for advocating unlawful violence after a racist and anti-Semitic speech calling for “revengeance” and for people to march on the Washington DC political establishment that “continues to suppress” white people. He appealed his conviction in a case that was eventually heard...

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